The Unyielding Phrase

THE UNYIELDING PHRASE Patrick Lane M,LY FATHER WAS BORN ON A FARM ПбЯГ Fort McLeod, Alberta, in igo8. He was not an educated man. My grandfather took him out of school when he was nine or ten and made him work in the fields until, at thirteen, he ran away to make a life for himself. In the next ten years he worked in a whore- house as a handyman, as a rigger in the oil-fields, and as a rodeo cowboy on the small-town circuit of the western plains. His rodeo name was The McLeod Kid. I was born in 1939. In 1941 my father went to fight in the Second World War. I never saw him again until 1945. What little I knew of him is what I have told you. He was my hero then. I appropriated his nickname, using it in my boyhood games of Cowboys-and-Indians. In 1978, ten years after his death, I wrote a poem called "The Witnesses" : To know as the word is known, to know little or less than little, nothing, to contemplate the setting sun and sit for hours, the world turning you into the sun as day begins again To remember words, to remember nothing but words and make out of nothing the past, to remember my father, The McLeod Kid carrying the beat, riding against time On the rodeo circuit of fifty years ago the prairie, stretched wet hide scraped by a knife, disappearing everywhere to know The McLeod Kid was defeated To know these things to climb into the confusions which are only words, to climb into desire to ride in the sun, to ride against time The McLeod Kid raking his spurs on the mare the cheers from the wagon-backs where the people sit to watch the local boy ride against the riders from Calgary 57 LANE To spit melon seeds into the dust to roll cigarettes, to leave them hanging from the lip, to tip your hat back and grin to laugh or not laugh, to climb into darkness Below the stands and touch Erla's breast to eat corn or melons, to roll cigarettes to drink beer, bottles hidden in paper bags to grin at the RCMP, horseless, dust on their boots To watch or not watch, to surround the spectacle horses asleep in their harness, tails switching bees swarming on melon rinds, flys buzzing and what if my words are their voices What if I try to capture an ecstasy that is not mine, what if these are only words saying this was or this was not, a story told to me until I now no longer believe it was told to me The witnesses dead? What if I create a past that never was, make out of nothing a history of my people whether in pain or ecstasy, my father riding in the McLeod Rodeo The hours before dawn when in the last of darkness I make out of nothing a man riding against time and thus my agony, the mare twisted sideways muscles bunched in knots beneath her hide Her mane, black hair feathered in the wind that I believe I see caked mud in her eyes the breath broken from her body and The McLeod Kid in the air, falling, the clock stopped? I called that poem "The Witnesses" because that's what I was doing, witnessing an event out of oral history, writing down what I imagined. I took the images of small-town rodeos from my own experience, building out of them the possible history of my father. He was one of those who drew his name when he signed it, a man who sat with a book in his lap in the evening and read it so slowly I believed he could only love single words. Now I know he couldn't read at all, but only imitated the ritual of reading. Was he ashamed? I don't know. I know that my becoming a writer is part of his illiteracy, my witnessing the events of his past and my past and the past of my own people something so crucial I can barely talk about it. That's why I've started this paper with a piece of my personal history. It's because that's what history is to me, something personal. Just as I can't separate the content from the form of my poems, so I can't separate history from my life. Poets and novelists use history differently from scholars, academics, and historians. 58 LANE The worlds poets create are imaginary ones. They are worlds designed to instruct both the intellect and the spirit, guides leading toward a new perception of people and things. They work against the abstract, and against what a scientific mind might call the facts. ΤI HE TRUTH FOR A WRITER is not factual truth, but truth as it is imagined to be. AI HwriteI r like Margaret Atwood can take Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In The Bush, first published in England in 1852 and purporting to be a "true" account of life in the wilderness of back-country Upper Canada, and transform it into a sequence of poems called The Journals Of Susanna Moodie. Atwood has replaced one fiction with another, she has re-imagined it. No one, of course, believes that the original book was anything more than a fiction although it purported to be an autobiography using fictional techniques, characters, and anecdotes used to represent what Moodie's life was like at the time. Susanna Moodie felt that she was telling the truth. As she herself said on the title page of Roughing It In The Bush : I sketch from nature, and the pictures true ; Whate'er the subject, whether grave or gay, Painful experience in a distant land Made it mine own. The distant painful land she spoke of is my own though for years I thought I lived somewhere else, that Canada was only a temporary place, somewhere I had been dropped off by accident. I was one of those children who believed he must have had another beginning, people more real, and not these ordinary folk who lived in a non-existent place, a place out of time. My people came to North America in 1632 landing at Jamestown, Virginia. They fought on both sides of the American Revolutionary War, my side of the family defeated and drifting north to Upper Canada as Loyalists to the mad King George III of England. That is what my family remembered, that was their pride. The place where we did this remembering was another place altogether, the far West of Canada on the edge of the Monashee mountains in a valley known only to ourselves. For the generation of writers who came of age during the post-War years Cana- dian history became an obsession. Their desire was to write it into existence. As they explored their imagined place they created a new image of Canada. This remaking or reimagining transformed the official record, the facts as they were known. To these writers history had to be revised. Of course, that's what writers have always done, bringing history into the immediate world, making it accessible through the medium of art and language. In the early sixties John Newlove says in "The Pride," a poem from his book Black Night Window, 59 LANE we seize on what has happened before, one line only will be enough, a single line and then the sunlit brilliant image suddenly floods us with understanding, shocks our attentions, and all desire stops, stands alone; we are no longer lonely we stand alone, but have roots, and the rooted words recur in the mind It is that shock to our attention, the flood of understanding, that the writer tries to achieve. In both Newlove and Atwood, as in all writers, it's that immanent moment they seek. In the case of history it is to have roots, or as Newlove goes on to say in "The Pride," the knowledge of our origins, and where we are in truth, whose land this is and is to be. But it is not only a knowledge of the factual roots of our history he is speaking of. He is speaking about the way a phrase or a line of poetry can change us by its cadence and by its measure, "the unyielding phrase, / in tune with the epoch," which is a quote from an obscure pamphlet by Leon Trotsky. As Newlove has it, "it springs upon us / out of our own mouths, / unconsidered, overwhelming / in its knowledge, complete—." He is speaking of the heightened response we associate with words when they are said in such a way as to move us deeply. What Newlove and Atwood and so many others did in their poems was to shock a whole generation of readers with a sudden recognition of place. A great American poet, William Carlos Williams, called this "a local pride." It was this new pride of place that writers wanted to create. Suddenly there was an emotional, a spiritual pride in what it was to be a Canadian. Who we were became legitimate within the framework of art, an articulated present that questioned what had gone before, and questioned what was to come. But the questions were raised in a new and distinctive voice, a voice never heard before, cadences and measures that were our own, separate and unique. In the forties and fifties Canada seemed to be a history-less place, particularly in the West.

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